Tobacco Asia

Tobacco Asia 59 • Double your resource value • Use 100% expanded fine- cut for MYO and RYO • Untouchable product quality • Impex – pressure/vacuum technology • DIET - Dry Ice Expansion Technology AircoDIET has supplied more than 55 DIET plants worldwide, many of which have been turn-key. We continuously develop and refine the DIET process and our DIET plants have above 95% uptime with a dry yield better than 98.5% through the plant. www.aircodiet.com Over 100% tobacco expansion When compared to the giants in the global tobacco supply chain, Malburo's annual volumes are modest. According to Dr. Noor, in 2022 the company traded ap- proximately 250 tons of top-grade FCV leaf and lamina, 500 tons of low-grade leaf, an equal volume of scraps, and 200 tons of custom-blended cut rag. The company also fulfills CRES orders on request. "Our volumes may appear small, but our advantage is that we always have stocks," asserted Dr. Noor. "We don't reject customers and go to great lengths to fulfill orders under the most difficult of circumstances and when larger companies must bail out," he claimed. This was possible due to Malburo's well-oiled, widespread partner network, he said. And perhaps to reinforce his point, he added, "You need Indian tobacco? I can get you Indian tobacco even when nobody else will." When, in 2017, Indonesian entrepreneur Tantawi Sagara founded SATA Cor- poration Limited in Hong Kong, it was with a focus on supplying Chinese tobaccos to overseas clients, including Indonesia's burgeoning cigarette manufacturing sector. Then, three years later, Sagara decided it was time to also set up a company back home. He established PT. SATA Tembakau not only to serve manufacturers in East and Central Java better, but also to crank up the firm's export business of Indonesian leaf. The firm today maintains its head office in Surabaya, operates a warehouse and storage facility in Bojonegoro and a buying station for Indonesian FCV in Lombok. In 2022, Sagara imported to Indonesia approximately 8,000 tons of FCV from China, Brazil, Zimbabwe, and the US. "All tobaccos from outside of Indonesia we procure directly from our trade partners located in the respective origin countries," he said. On the other hand, domestic Indonesian tobaccos are obtained either from the company's own contracted farmers (20% of total annual volume) or from other local merchants (80%). While Sagara declined to disclose a concrete annual tonnage, he divulged that around 50% of the Indonesian tobacco is supplied to domestic manu- facturers while the remaining half is exported. For GLT and primary processing, the company uses third-party facilities in Bojonegoro and Sidoarjo. Asked what the most persistent challenges for his company were over the past 12 months, Sagara insisted that it had been a good year overall. "We were able to actually foresee that a tobacco shortage was looming and knew that it would result in frantic demand both domestically and internationally and would cause prices to skyrocket," he said. Admitting that it was a bit of a speculative gamble at first, he decided to buy up "quite a lot of inventory to position us comfortably". The gamble paid out, of course, illustrated by steeply increasing purchasing inquiries streaming in from the company's clients soon enough. Credit: SATA Corporation Limited Curing shed in East Java.

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